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Games aren’t dead. PC games aren’t dead. Adventure games aren’t dead. Hell, people are making adventure games out of Youtube clips, stitching together choose-your-own-adventure games through clips and links. That’s not dead, just weird. Games are weird, everyone! Edyn’s Escape is an interactive trailer for Techland’s up and coming FPS slasher, Hellraid. You will see a bit of the game and then make a decision about what happens next. Like RPS articles, you need to click through to see the result. Unlike most RPS articles, apart from that one where I accidentally imbued the text with a culling song from Scottish folklore, there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll end up dead with each decision. Click to see it below.
*boom* You are dead. Aha! Just kidding, but that’s the sort of thing you can expect if you continue with this trailer sequence. It’s apparantly a small prequel to the main game, though that context is meaningless. It doesn’t say much about the game that we didn’t already know: it’ll be a trawl through skeleton-packed castles full of loot. There will be hitting and magic. What it doesn’t show is the co-operative mode, where you can play with a team of four, or that the action will be governed by an AI GM, so things will be different with each playthrough. It’s all pretty standard stuff, but it looks utterly gorgeous, and my Steam-hole has room for a brainless, co-op demon-basher.

Stuff like Dead Island wasn’t to my liking (though their upcoming zombie game looks promising) but you may want to try Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, a nice arcade FPS that is actually quite polished and entertaining. Sure, I suppose it’s essentially Call of Duty: Wild West but the theme makes it and at least it’s a budget title and a quite fun one at that.

I played Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Quit playing after 3-4 hours in because it was so monotone and mouse sensitivity for the duels was completely broken for me so I had to alt-tab to windows to adjust windows mouse sensitivity to get past them.

I remember enjoying Bound in Blood quite a bit at the time. I don’t recall having those issues, though I wouldn’t say the duels in the new one are great they’re just silly mini games and a few minutes of gameplay in total, the bulk of the games is good old FPS fun.

If on that video you choose the chest you die. Pretty stupid. I can understand it taking half your health and the potion only restoring 25%, but dying without giving any clues if it’s a trap or anything like that is just stupid.
Also if you choose the battleaxe he just stands there not even swinging it. But with a one-handed sword he swings it once and the zombies/whatever die
Really now this is getting stupid…

Wow talk about stupid for a trailer. Arbitrary 50% chance of instance “YOU FAILED” on any decision. Without being given any kind of information to help you make the decision.
If this is how the game is like, that’s a clear sign the “YOU FAILED” will be showing up for the devs of this nonsense.

Little about Dark Souls was arbitrary, being cautious and thorough could save you tons of deaths so try that after you stop fleeing. Still, I’m pretty sure this game won’t resemble a dodgy point & click adventure with constant binary choices of life and death so they’re probably quite safe on that regard at least.

I understand why people love Dark Souls, and I have a certain respect for its uncompromising vision, but I still think it wouldn’t have been ruined had it had some difficulty sliders in there. I’ll never understand why you would want to make a game with a mult-faceted narrative informed by stellar visual design and level layouts, cram a bunch of secrets into it, top it off with a flexible character development system, and then make the game accessible only to people willing to spend hundreds of hours mastering every step of it in order to beat it the first time. Nobody has ever said Devil May Cry 3 was worse because it offered an easy mode, and that game wasn’t offering much other than the challenge of battle.

I’m by no means an expert action gamer. I like the games but I don’t have the dexterity to play bullet hell shmups competently or do the crazy combos others achieve in the earlier Devil May Cry games. I think you’re exaggerating what it takes to play Dark Souls well. It takes some thinking and a methodical approach, I think you can get the hang of it if you set your mind to it. With a gamepad. Again, I don’t have the crazy skills of other gamers but I find games like Dark Souls or Monster Hunter which are more about method than combo strings quite manageable. Perhaps something else has you stumped, for example this is slightly off topic but I could not play the Infinity Engine games for ages, until one day the DnD combat system finally clicked and I had a blast and have longed for more games with such real time with pause systems since. I wonder how Aarklash: Legacy shaped up, it has such a system and seems to get decent reviews but only by a very few sources, granted it’s not quite an RPG but more of a tactical adventure I suppose, perhaps akin to a modern Icewind Dale of sorts link to tinyurl.com

Dark Souls isn’t all that hard, with the exception of a few fights. It does demand that players pay attention and learn from visual and audio cues. It is vague in what it wants you to do. It does allow you to wander into areas you can’t handle, so I guess if you stubbornly bang your head against that area it’s pretty hard,.

It’s funny you mention Monster Hunter, because I love Monster Hunter! I agree that they have a similar mentality, but MH does a much better job of building things up. You’re unlikely to have half of your health knocked off by a single jaggi, and MH doesn’t ask you to cross a bridge guarded by a rathalos an hour in. By the time the gloves come off, you’ll either have quit or come to grips with the game’s systems, but more importantly the game really wants you to get off on the right foot.

Dark Souls doesn’t really care very much if you make any progress. I’ve heard people say things along the lines of “you’ll get to a point at which you know you can win,” which is true of many games and which is great (think of those games where your victory is never really in question; not very exciting, are they?). I think that they just start you off at too low of a place. It’s the difference between climbing a mountain and scaling a sheer cliff.

Dark Souls isn’t as hard as people make it out to be. Put a bunch of points into vitality and endurance, and it gets a lot easier. Pay attention and take your time, and it also gets easier. Use sorcery on most of the bosses, and it’s still easier.

It’s not the kind of game where you sprint forward and all the monsters explode with loot and congratulations as you wave at them.

The main source of difficulty for me was the controls, since I hadn’t done any serious gamepad gaming in years.

Well yeah but on the other hand, so what if the dragon killed you? You just respawn and then you know not to do that again and try to avoid him as he surely seems impossible to kill. Sure, it was a jerk move to have him pop up and burn you but those are few and far between in my opinion, and don’t really cost you much of anything with the death system in place. Actually I remember in MonHunTri having a random early mission pit you against a Lagiacrus, no way would I be able to kill it at the time and even in the mission I was supposed to get away instead, but I’m sure it made some people stumble. Similarly in Freedom Unite a Tigrex showed up in another mission that should have been mundane, also before being able to stand up to him on skill or equipment level. It’s cool to see what you’re striving towards early on. To be able to kill such things. Plus, Tri is notorious for TOO MUCH easing in, the mundane tutorial missions last too long before you get to fight your first boss, the Great Jaggi.

Yes, the early Lagiacrus encounter is a good example, but the game explicitly tells you to run away. In Tri Ultimate, they do the same thing with Deviljho later on. My beef with Dark Souls is I could never quite come to grips with the area of effect on the dragon’s breath. I eventually managed to make it to the side staircase, but it was remarkably hard to time, considering I was just trying to avoid the streaming gout of flame long enough to go around, rather than through.

What really soured me on Dark Souls was a bit a little past that. I had beaten the armored boar and was feeling like I was actually kind of enjoying myself; it was tough, but the thrill of surviving was kind of exhilarating. Then I walked up a stairwell, slowly–ever so slowly–trying to avoid triggering something nasty, when WHAM! black knight kills me from behind with just my head sticking up from the stairwell as I tried to get a better view. It really irked me that my attempts to get on the game’s bandwidth just resulted in me setting up a different death for myself.

Just go back, those knights are piece of cake compared to the boar! Just be careful and wait for them to do an attack to bash them in the process as they sometimes can quite efficiently parry (the same way you can, by using that move that looks like a shield bash just as the enemy attacks) and basically one hit counter kill you. He must have heard you coming mind, you may not have creeped right, if they don’t see you or hear you they shouldn’t aggro normally, allowing you to get the jump on them. There are also aggro ranges so you can lure enemies one by one to help you in a spot near there with a few of those knights at once. You still progressed, the boar doesn’t respawn as it’s a boss, you got the souls and any item if you got lucky, just go back and pick up the souls you dropped when the knight killed you and carry on progressing. I’m sure you’ve had moments you wanted to rage quit Monster Hunter, perhaps after losing to a boss you were fighting for ~30 minutes and thought you were close to beating but made a bad move and got killed or run out of (arbitrary style!) time :)

Ahhh Darksouls. The game that can make any self described hardcore gamer feel inadequate. The trick to enjoying dark souls is just to accept your gonna die(Prepare to die wasn’t just a cool catchphrase after all huh?) Your gonna die on bosses, your gonna die for stupid reasons, you just gonna die. If one can’t wrap his or her brain around that then they will not enjoy the game and likely won’t make it past the tutorial dungeon without rage quiting. But hey take comfort in that you made it farther than some of my friends before giving up!

I haven’t yet played Dark Souls, but if we can go off of Demon’s Souls it isn’t that hard once you start learning it. Yeah, I died a ton of times in the first level and plenty of times in the second, but after that I started to get things down. I developed the skills I needed both personally and with my character and acquired the equipment I needed to make things work for me. By that point I almost never died and was able to make it through several levels without a single death.

It’s not so much a hard game as one that doesn’t leave you with much room for error. But once you learn how to stop making those mistakes and playing defensively you’ll find that it’s not usually a problem.

Yep, like Dark Souls.
Searching through a chest with an enemy hot on your heels? I’ll apply my tried and true method of health over loot. How do I increase the chances of survival with an unarmed inexperienced monk? Protection first, worry about damage later – shield and sword. Which path do I take? The one that’s got light all over it. Not the ones with shuffling sounds and moans.

Ah, but now we’ve got a question of what tone the game is going to take! If this is a traditional ARPG in the vein of a-franchise-that-begins-with-D-but-which-RPS-won’t-allow-me-to-mention-in-posts-for-some-reason (specifically the second and third titles), then going for the horde of monsters is probably the right thing to do. If it leans in a more pure-RPG direction, where character growth is more than just the sum total of how many monsters you’ve slain, or if the monsters are designed to be tough opponents and/or the game is taking more of a survival route, then yes, you want to try to avoid fights when possible.

I personally think there’s a market for a game that combines the atmosphere of Amnesia with a combat system that’s robust enough to be fun but not so empowering that it undermines said atmosphere. I’m glad I’m not the developer who has to work that out, but God bless that team in advance.

I dislike this kind of trailer, having to click through tons of videos just for a few seconds of footage. I sadly haven’t found anything interesting, just getting killed by some monsters while going through mundane rooms, it’s not even showing fighting mechanics. Good environment graphics I guess but the last full trailer made the game look more like Hexen than Dark Souls in first person, too much spell shooting, so I was hoping to see some nice melee fighting here. I can’t really bother trying all the different possibilities (edit: apparently there aren’t possibilities, just a binary live or die, at first I thought that you could die later on based on what you chose earlier, for example if the chest had a weapon that I found instead of getting the health potion I could survive a monster, but nope, the chest kills me too) however, so if anyone has found a good part, please link to it if it’s at all possible. Going to their channel doesn’t seem to show all the videos separately, only the very first one.

I just went and watched some previous trailer for the game. It’s so different you would think they are different games. There’s no slow creeping around and being 1-shotted by hiding baddies. Instead it’s a bit more like doom or heck even Skyrim, just constant first-person action.

I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt by saying that I presume it’s actually considerably better than this dismal interactive nonsense would make you think; but even so, my interest in playing it has just plummeted.

I once played a choose-your-own-adventure game that was stenciled onto the sidewalks. You choose a path and wandered off following arrows until you reached the next text box. Less adventure and more generic romance, but still an interesting way of making the physical location part of the story. It was an interesting experiment.